A Bridge Too Far Ty Cobb's dentures are among the bizarre objects coveted these days by crazed collectors

Ty Cobb died in 1961, but his dentures still speak to KarenShemonsky--if not literally, in the manner of windup chatteringnovelty teeth, then emotionally. "I first saw them in a colorphoto in my husband's copy of Business Week," says the54-year-old daughter of a dentist. "The teeth were open, and thecaption said, 'Ty's teeth could be yours for $300 to $500.' Ithought, Five hundred dollars? For Ty Cobb's teeth? That's asteal."

Naturally, Cobb's choppers were coveted by countless Americans,who gazed upon his partial plates--three teeth on the lower, sixon the upper--and felt a Fixodent bond with the great man. HenceShemonsky had to pay, at a 1999 Sotheby's auction, $6,500 for thenot-so-pearly off-whites, which she enshrined for a month beneatha glass dome on a table in the living room of her home in ClarksSummit, Pa. "I surrounded the teeth with a glove and a ball andbooks about Cobb," says Shemonsky. "Made a real nice display withthe dentures."

Since at least 326 A.D., when the One True Cross was discoveredand promptly splintered into keepsakes for Christians, man haslonged for a piece of every historical colossus. So,increasingly, the auctioneer's gavel beats a funeral march forgood taste, having signaled the sale of Bill Veeck's wooden leg,Mickey Mantle's hair clippings and Art Modell's private ClevelandStadium toilet (whose buyer, like the object itself,is--presumably--flushed with pride).

Americans' inability to discard anything to do with sports ismost starkly in evidence on eBay, on which Dick McAuliffe'sgame-worn 1975 Red Sox home pants--"with working zipper"--were lastweek on offer for $24.99. I am not, I must confess, immune to thedouble-knit call of these dirtied trousers.

For years I have rented a walk-in storage locker in a terrifyingbuilding with concrete hallways, lit by single bare bulbs, inwhich are cast the long shadows of my fellow patrons--serialkillers, most of them, who have come to warehouse their victims.My 10-by-10-foot unit is also filled with items that I have nouse for but cannot dispose of: press passes and commemorativepins; official blue pucks from the old World Hockey Association,relics that resemble disinfectant urinal cakes; a fringed pieceof paper that Julius Erving signed for me at the Mychal ThompsonBasketball Camp in 1980; ticket stubs and game programs; acollection of baseball cards that serve as a comprehensive recordof big league facial hair from 1974 to '81; and two decades'worth of SPORTS ILLUSTRATEDs, piled everywhere in uneven stacksthat form a bar graph of my declining sanity.

That ours is a nation of demented collectors delights andbefuddles Malcolm Alexander, 42, who was raised in rustic Moruya,Australia. Twelve years ago the Aussie emigrated to the U.S.,where he has become the world's only bobblehead doll magnate.Next month alone Alexander's company, Alexander Global Promotionsin Bellevue, Wash., will mint one million sports bobbleheads foran insatiable American public. Minnesota Twins fans have sleptovernight outside the Metrodome to get one of 10,000 KirbyPuckett bobbleheads. Adults in Philadelphia bribed fans aged14-and-under for the Allen Iverson bobbleheads given away at aSixers game. One Midwestern couple plans to spend 11 weekendsthis summer driving 1,140 miles round trip to attend games of theColumbus Clippers, the New York Yankees' Triple A farm club,simply to obtain the bobbleheaded doppelgangers of their favoriteballplayers.

No one is more obsessive about the figurines than the athleteswho achieve spring-necked immortality. "They all want the chinsmore chiseled and the arms a bit buffer on their bobbleheads,"says Alexander, who employs 35 sculptors in China. These artistsare heirs to the great Renaissance sculptors, commissioned, asthey are, to create the likenesses of modern-day Medicis. "Youwant to get Derek Jeter's dimples just right," says Alexander."One athlete--and I won't tell you who--looked at his prototype andsaid, 'I want my butt lifted and bubbled a bit.'"

Don't we all? But then, "Beauty," as Karen Shemonsky observes,"is in the eye of the beholder. I've been collecting all mylife." She was thrilled last week when the Baseball Hall of Fameaccepted, on loan, Cobb's disencraniumed dentures, which will bedisplayed in Cooperstown under glass, like roast pheasant, allsummer long. Shemonsky says she will miss the plaster prosthesis,but looks forward to new opportunities in home decor.